I have often wished that the first two books of the Excursion had been
published separately, under the name of "The Deserted Cottage." They would
have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beautiful poems in the
language.
* * * * *
Can dialogues in verse be defended? I cannot but think that a great
philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from
himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit
development of thought. In prose there may be a difference; though I must
confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors
do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The
introductions and little urbanities are, to be sure, very delightful in
their way; I would not lose them; but I have no admiration for the practice
of ventriloquizing through another man's mouth.
* * * * *
I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen
books on the growth of an individual mind--superior, as I used to think,
upon the whole, to the Excursion. You may judge how I felt about them by my
own poem upon the occasion.[1] Then the plan laid out, and, I believe,
partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a
man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to
deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man,
--a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature,
and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of
the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of
society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the
high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of
the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal
the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being
subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing
how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and
restoration. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in
substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy.
[Footnote 1:
Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 206. It is not too much to say of this beautiful
poem, and yet it is difficult to say more, that it is at once worthy of the
poet, his subject, and his object:--
"An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts,
To their own music chanted."--ED.]
* * * * *
I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet
than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since
Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the
contemplative position, which is peculiarly--perhaps I might say
exclusively--fitted for him. His proper title is _Spectator ab extra_.
* * * * *
_July_ 23. 1832.